


Mourning the Future

by potatoesanddreams



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Fluff, Friendship, Prophetic Dreams, and a bit of angst, i'd call it ominous fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-27 00:37:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19779700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potatoesanddreams/pseuds/potatoesanddreams
Summary: She remembered waking suddenly in the dark, her veins icy with adrenaline, throwing off her bedsheet and leaping to the corner of the room with agility she didn’t know she had, putting her back to the wall and reaching for – something – something in her blood, something the dream had told her she possessed. As her delirium faded, she’d realized that something did not exist.-The day before their lives are irrevocably changed, Cassie and Rachel spend a quiet afternoon at Cassie's family's farm. But something is troubling Cassie.





	Mourning the Future

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for m-to-the-6th-power (on tumblr) as part of the Animorphs Fic Exchange run by the--abomination in June 2019. After posting it to Tumblr, I'm finally getting around to posting it here as well.

It was a bright, hot autumn afternoon. Cassie sat barefoot in the tough grass by the side of the house, resting her chin on her knees, her body tucked in small under the shade of the eaves. She was watching a hawk circle over the meadow below the house, and waiting for Rachel to arrive.  
Cassie was looking forward to this more than usual – and that was saying a lot; she and Rachel had been best friends for so long, Cassie couldn’t even remember when it was they had first met. It was almost never a bad day to hang out with Rachel, cheerful and fierce, who would menace half your problems into leaving you alone, and distract you from the other half with storebought sugar cookies and enthusiastic small talk. That was welcome at the best of times, but today, Cassie was especially eager to be distracted.

Was it four-thirty yet? Rachel must be late; Cassie wasn’t wearing a watch, but she felt certain she had been outside for at least half an hour already. She shifted, fidgeting with the grass by her feet, plucking blades and shredding them between her fingers. A mosquito buzzed around her head and she uncurled her body, ready to swat it.

“Finally!”

A moment’s impression: loose blonde hair, an enormous smile. Almost before Cassie had seen her friend, Rachel’s hands were in hers, pulling her up from the ground and straight into a hug. “I found your mom in the barn. She said you were in your room but you weren’t. I’ve been all over the farm – what’re you doing back here?”  
“Nothing much,” said Cassie, squeezing tight before she pulled back from the hug. “I wanted to think. And it’s so hot – the shade’s nice.”

“Tell me about it! I can’t believe I biked all the way out here.” Rachel let go of one of Cassie’s hands, pushing back strands of hair that had stuck in the sweat on her forehead. “So what were you thinking about?”

“Let’s go inside,” said Cassie. “We can have lemonade.”

They trooped round the corner and across the porch to the front door. Inside, the buzzing of half a dozen electric fans muffled the sound of their footsteps on the floorboards. When they reached the kitchen, Cassie got the lemonade from the fridge while Rachel took a pair of mismatched mugs from a cabinet.

“Yum,” she said, when she saw the ceramic pitcher Cassie had set on the table. “Homemade.”

They sipped their drinks in comfortable silence for a minute or two. Cassie could hear her father walking about upstairs – collecting the laundry, maybe, or organizing his books at long last. He was singing something, the words unintelligible over the noise of the fans. Cassie finished her mugful of lemonade and pillowed her head in her arms, squeezing her eyes shut.

Rachel cocked her own head. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” said Cassie. She opened her eyes, propping her chin on her wrist so as to look at Rachel right-side-up. “I’m just tired. I didn’t sleep well.”

“How come?”

Cassie sighed. “I had a bad nightmare. I kept waking up terrified, and when I calmed down and fell asleep again, I’d go right back into the same dream. It lasted all night.”

Cassie shut her eyes again. She hadn’t wanted to talk about this. She’d wanted to be distracted, but… now that the subject had been brought up, maybe it was best to share. Maybe it would help. “I keep thinking about it,” she admitted. “All day. It’s freaking me out. It’s like… well, it’s almost like I’m still dreaming, or like the dream’s still waiting for me, if that makes sense. Like I’m going to slip back into it again, and there’s nothing I can do.”

“That seriously sucks.” Rachel frowned. “You were kind of out of it at school today. I guess that’s why.”

She got up, leaving her second mugful of lemonade half-finished, and came around the table to drape her arms around Cassie’s shoulders. Cassie sat up a little, leaning back into the hug, and Rachel rested her chin on the top of her friend’s head. “Do you want to tell me what the dream was about?” she asked.

“That’s the thing,” Cassie said. “I can’t remember.”

Rachel was silent a moment. “But if you don’t remember it, then how is it still scaring you?”

“I don’t know!” Cassie squirmed in her chair, feeling suddenly constricted by her friend’s arms around her, and Rachel let go. Cassie twisted around to face her. “I don’t get it. I shouldn’t even know that I had a nightmare, right? Or I should just remember waking up from one, and go ‘huh, that’s why I’m so tired,’ and then forget about it! But it’s like there’s this blacked-out spot in my memory, and I know that’s the nightmare, and it’s sitting right there in my head, but I can’t get at it to find out what scared me so much! I just know it felt – oh, Rachel. It felt so horrible. I remember that much.”

She was clinging to the back of her chair like it was a buoy in a stormy sea. 

Rachel’s eyes went wide. “Whoa,” she said, “hey, Cassie, you’re kind of freaking me out. You don’t have to worry, okay? It was just a dream.”

“Yeah,” Cassie muttered, looking away. “Just a dream.”

“Let’s…” Rachel cast about herself. Her eyes fell on the pitcher of lemonade and at once she picked it up, refilling Cassie’s mug. “Here. It’s hot, drink some more. Then let’s go out to the barn or something. You can tell me about the new animals.”

“All right,” said Cassie, without much enthusiasm. Her breathing was slowing, the moment of panic fading away. But the unremembered fear was still there, lurking in the back of her mind. She didn’t want to dwell on it, but nothing else felt important enough to focus on. The terror she had felt in her sleep had been so concrete – she remembered waking suddenly in the dark, her veins icy with adrenaline, throwing off her bedsheet and leaping to the corner of the room with agility she didn’t know she had, putting her back to the wall and reaching for – something – something in her blood, something the dream had told her she possessed. As her delirium faded, she’d realized that something did not exist. But that was only one of the times she’d been jolted out of her sleep.

“ – to hang out in the barn?” Rachel was saying. “We could do something else if you want. But we should definitely get your mind off this dream.”

Cassie shook herself. “Yeah,” she said, “yeah, definitely. The barn’s fine.” She gulped down a mouthful of lemonade and stood. “Let’s go.”

They headed back out into the heat, Rachel adjusting her sweatband and Cassie fanning herself with both hands. The barn was several degrees cooler than outside, and the dimness was refreshing after the bright sun they had just walked through; Cassie decided not to turn on the overhead lights. Her mother had left, but Cassie could smell the cleaning supplies she must have been using on some of their patients’ cages. The scent mingled with the ordinary smells of the barn, fur and sweat and hay.

She was trying quite hard to notice the things around her, safe and everyday, and not to think about the dream.

“Hey, who’s this?” Rachel asked. She was striding over to one of the cages. Cassie followed. Inside the cage was a bird, a raptor. It watched the young humans with alert black eyes.

“That’s a red-tailed hawk,” said Cassie. “Its wing’s broken. See how my mom’s done the bandage so it can’t pull it off with its beak?”

“Uh-huh,” said Rachel earnestly. “How long has it been here? I haven’t seen it before.”

They were pretending, but as time went on it got easier, less stilted – and eventually something shifted, and they were no longer hunting hard for a new topic every time the conversation lulled, but moving lightly and comfortably from subject to subject, just as they were used to doing. And Cassie had almost forgotten the fear in the back of her mind.

“Hey,” Rachel was saying, “did I tell you I actually aced the pre-quiz this week in biology?”

“You didn’t,” said Cassie, “that’s great!”

“It is. I know that class is your whole thing, but it’s not mine. This week’s been my week, though!”

“Just because she started with wildlife studies doesn’t mean every unit’s going to be about stuff I know,” Cassie objected. “And you’re way better than me in language arts.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not putting myself down or anything. You know I wouldn’t.” And Rachel laughed.

It was something about the way she stood, the tilt of her head, that hawk in its cage behind her, the way the sunlight shining through the cracks in the barn door caught on her eyes, her teeth. Something Cassie remembered, but from the wrong direction. And something that wasn’t there, something missing, horribly missing, from farther off in the same direction – frozen in a moment, that smile –

Suddenly Cassie was aching, and the fear in the back of her head had unraveled into not fear only, but shame also, and grief, and love and laughter, far too many things to count or to untangle. She ran at Rachel, wrapping her arms tight around her best friend’s waist, burying her face in Rachel’s shoulder. Startled, Rachel’s arms lifted, settled around Cassie’s back. “What’s going on?”

“I remembered more about my dream,” Cassie said into her shoulder, because it was the best approximation of the truth she could find a way to put into words. “Something happened to you in it. And I wasn’t there.”

“Oh, Cassie.” Rachel squeezed her friend close. “I’m here. I’m right here.”

“I know.” Cassie shut her eyes tight. Now that the lump of fear had broken into all those pieces, the dream was fading from her mind at last. But the emotions that had come out of the fear, those were still there, sharp and stinging. “We’re going to stick together, right? Through anything?”

“Anything at all.”

“And I’ll protect you.”

“You won’t need to.” Rachel pulled away a little, so that the two were looking into each other’s eyes. She winked. “I’m indestructible.”


End file.
